If you live in Iowa, you may have noticed that the clouds yesterday afternoon were very thin (having short vertical extent). The featured chart presents a vertical sounding of the atmosphere over Ames based on model data from the RAP model. The red line is temperature and green line is dew point. As the sun heats the ground, the lower part of the atmosphere warms and mixes vertically until it reaches air that is relatively much warmer and unwilling to mix down. The sounding shows that this level was very well defined with a sharp increase in temperature and rapid decrease in moisture. This caused the vertical extent of the clouds that developed at the top of the mixed lower atmosphere to be very flat.

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Tags:   sounding  

The featured chart is from the excellent precipitable water climatology page on the Rapid City, SD NWS website. The chart displays the observed monthly ranges of the amount of water in the atmosphere. On Monday evening, the Davenport sounding had well over 2 inches of water observed, which is near the maximum end of the range. All of this water in the atmosphere makes for efficient rainers as slow moving storms are able to quickly process all of that water in the column.

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Tags:   sounding